Facing a January 30 deadline for another federal government shutdown, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Tuesday that the Democratic leadership would not seek to block funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other units of the Department of Homeland Security.
Can we please begin to vote for a third party? Mexico did it…. Why not us?
We have 2 entrenched parties. The Republicans have about half the vote. If we fracture the vote on the left even a little bit then we lose. EG for example suppose we WOULD win with 51% of the vote suppose we convince 90% of the would be democrats to vote green.
The vote is now 45.9 Green 5.1 Dem 49% Republican aaaaand we now lose for the next 100 years. This is actually the optimistic case. Even if you get a green candidate who satisfies literally everyone on the left some will KNOW this can’t fuckin work and yell at the defectors and some will dislike anything left of the dems and refuse to move so you probably get closer to 26% one and 25% the other. If carried out broadly enough you would hand an unstoppable super majority to the other side which they will use to fix it so your vote is suppressed forever.
You can’t just vote third party you have to first reform the system. The most basic plausible move is instant runoff or something similar at the state level.
In Denmark we have 11 parties that have qualified to join the elections last time.
It’s no big deal
Although it’s not the one with the most votes that wins. The winner needs to have a minimum of seats and if not, they need to make a joint administration with other parties to sum up to the minimum number of seats
Your government is fundamentally different than ours. Given 2 large entrenched parties which are nearly equal in a system which is winner take all at every stage of the game any third party which gets any substantial portion of the vote splits the vote with whatever party it is most like ensuring its opposition wins.
EG imagine you wanted to grow say the green party in given district which is 51% Dem 49% Republican. If it were to wildly successful it would need to grow from 1% to a plurality organically probably over several or even many election seasons. It is unlikely to get many Republican votes because Republicans have solidarity and its positions are substantially different so by the time the green party has grown to 3% of the vote its throwing every election to the Republicans. This continues to be true at 30% because 90% of its votes come from the left. At some point you would reach changeover and become the defacto left wing party but by that time you will have found the state has gerrymandered your district to the point where you can’t win and all the money essentially millions of dollars in legal bribes is still flowing to the now minority party.
This is literally impossible to fix at the ballot box by people voting for third parties. This is why for example the green party has existed for 40 years and in all that time has never elected anyone to federal office and has in only a handful of cases held a state office wherein they run and stay green.
The US system is designed to make this impractical and it has only become more so with intensely parties making getting votes from both sides increasingly ridiculous. Anyone you would want to elect is going to have to take a stand against essentially the American nazi party in power now.
We didn’t change to this right after being Vikings… systems can and should change with time.
We’ve already seen major changes in the way politics work, just within the last 50 years.
Party elites lost control when they were replaced by primaries
Campaign finance rules were rewritten by the courts changing who funds them
Gerrymandering was effectively legalized as a “political question”
None of this was inevitable. It happened because laws, court rulings, party rules, and public pressure changed.
So when people say “the system is broken and can’t be fixed,” history says otherwise
Easier to have DSA candidates replace the corpodems.
It won’t work so long as you have first-past-the-post voting.
We need a working class party